ISC West teases are starting to come out. I've got to say this is much more palatable than a Playboy bunny hype, if still not exactly high brow.
I'm waiting for the day when a manufacturer runs an ad: "Come see greatest living author Toni Morrison at Booth 12546!" That would be hot.

You may remember Smartvue from my link to Martin Renkis looking dapper, but with all this talk lately about security and video as a service, now is the time to check out their new VaaS offering.
You can find all the details here, on their brand-new Web site, which launched last night. It's admittedly a little bit different than your standard security company web site.
It's geared toward the end user, yes, with pricing and equipment lists and things that often scare dealers who want to competitively price and be creative with system design, but here's the rationale from Bill Hapner, head of sales for Smartvue:
"We're handing the lead to them, having the customer sign up to get the financing done on the front end. Then the dealer gets the installation fee. Then I'm going to pay them either a one-time fee or I'll give them a piece of the deal over the three years. And most every one of them is okay with it so far. The bigger guys will just go out and do it on their own because they don't need our help with the financing ... It takes 24 hours to get approved if you're an approvable business and we're ready to go. And people seem to be okay with putting the pricing and equipment online. And that's really to protect the dealers. It's so some guy can't come out and advertise at three points above cost. They can't advertise anything less than what we've got on the web. I thought I'd get some push back on that, but I haven't."
A wireless 1TB NVR, four-high-res-camera video surveillance system for $199 a month with a "buy now" button on the web that still keeps the dealer and the channel involved? That seems pretty interesting.

I just got off the phone with someone over at Rapid Response Monitoring. I wanted to call and see if someone at Rapid Response would be able to spend some time away from their own ISC West booth to drift on over to the Security Systems News booth for a sit down with me on camera for ssnTVnews. I found out that Rapid Response is not exhibiting this year at ISC West. It is perhaps a sign of the times. I was told that they will have reps there but will not have a booth.
This will be my first visit to ISC West, so I have no point of reference, but I'm assured by my predecessor, Leischen Stelter that the Rapid Response booth was not to be missed.
Perhaps next year.

In the battle for the hearts and minds of the general public, it looks like security professionals are getting somewhere. Sure, there are still ACLU types and others how are concerned about privacy issues when it comes to video surveillance, and sometimes they raise good points about who has access to the video and what legislation still needs to be ironed out, but the general public doesn't seem as much bothered by video cameras anymore.
As proof, I offer this editorial from the Montana Kaimin, the student newspaper for the University of Montana. Seriously, when the student newspaper is advocating for CCTV, the paradigm has shifted considerably, I think.
Some choice paragraphs:

These examples give me hope that students across the country will become more accepting of security cameras on campus. Iâ€™m sure some will argue that placing 30 surveillance cameras in the UC is invasive and invokes a â€œBig Brother is watching youâ€ feel, but given the robberies of the UC Market and Jus Chillâ€™n, I think actions speak louder than words.

Gosh, I love when people use meaningless cliches to (not) make a point. Both capturing video of people in the UC and robbing Jus Chill'n are actions, actually. And both complaining about Big Brother and complaining about being robbed are words. So which actions speak louder than which words?
Anyhoo:

Itâ€™s a viable goal and it can happen with your support. Itâ€™s in our hands to encourage the change. The UC wouldnâ€™t be the good institution it is if it didnâ€™t respond to student wants and needs. Letâ€™s all help the UC return to a safe and comfortable environment for many years to come.

Ah, incitement to action. You know, save the rain forest, end the war, install the video cameras! I can just hear the chant:
"Hey UC bureaucracy/Install the cameras immediately"
Boy do I miss college.

I came across this story at www.wvgazette.com, and found it interesting. The economy is certainly bad. I mean, even the Girl Scouts have been effected.
The question remains, however, if the bad economy is really driving a spike in crime. The above referenced story from West Virginia asks the question, "Do you really think honest people are losing their jobs in the bad economy and then making the tough decision to turn to a life of crime in order to pay the bills?" Probably not. The story points out it's more likely a natural ebb and flow of criminal activity, mostly related to drugs.
However, the media (of which, I suppose, I am a part) hypes the increase in activity as a direct result of the bad economy, which leads many people to go out and invest in security systems to protect what's theirs from all those desperate people out of work. This story from Southern Maryland Online claims there is a direct link between bad economy and increased crime, again, due to people out of work turning to alcohol and drugs for escape and then getting into chemical-induced mischief. The thing is, those who would resort to crime are probably resorting to crime to buy more drugs or booze (especially once they're already drug-addled), which they would have done regardless of whether the economy was going gang-busters or in the toilet. Now I'm not complaining, exactly. The important thing about a security system is that it makes its owner feel more comfortable, more safe, so in that regard, the purchasing and owning of a security system self-fulfills, and is independent of the crime rate or the economy. And hey, the increase in business for all those security companies out there gives me something to write about for my paper.

While my family and colleagues are digging out from yet another Monday snowstorm, I'm in Scottsdale waiting for the sun to come up so I can go for a run before the day's events begin here at the AMAG's Security Engineering Symposium.
Sam tells me we've got six inches of snow and it's still dumping in Maine right now. Most of the office will be working from home no doubt, so if you're trying to reach Sam or Dan today, email's a better bet than calling.
In soon-to-be-sunny Scottsdale,AMAG's got a full day planned for the 70-plus consultants who are here for the event.
We'll be hearing about managing multiple levels of security for data centers from Ingersoll Rand; more on H.264 from Axis; HID's launch of 'HID on the Desktop' and lots more.
Sun's coming up, more later.

First time I've ever seen security advertised on Facebook.
No idea who these guys are, but their add popped up next to my home page (and I don't talk about my security work on Facebook).
Good to see some creative marketing in the security industry.

Sorry for the delay on this, but with travel and some office things that needed attention I haven't been able to find the time to sit down and smash all of Day 2 into a neat little entry. Now, with snow piling up outside the home-office window, I think I've got an opening (barring small children throwing things at me).
First up was the "Technology Lightning Round," my own personal brain-child, allowing some companies with cool technology who didn't quite make the cut for a full 45-minute presentation to each have 10-12 minutes to talk about what makes what they do unique and how it has the chance to change the industry. I pitched it to them as a chance to be an evangelist, to get people excited about their secret sauce, to use the time for an extended elevator pitch, to be a hype man. They took that advice to differing degrees.
The guy who really got it was Randall Foster, CEO of Vumii, a company with technology that makes me go, "Wow." I wrote about him here, after ISC last year. Basically, the wow part is that Vumii makes a laser-based night-vision camera that can tell who's driving a car from about a mile away at night. It's pretty amazing (Foster says he's got some crazy stuff thanks to the fact that the laser can see through reflective windows, too, but I'll let him post those on Vumii's x-rated hidden site).
But what Foster spoke about with his 10 minutes is the way that the laser vision can be incorporated, using IP technology, into an overall surveillance system. With a panoramic view of a situation, you can have cameras scanning different points of a 360-view, looking for problems. Then, when something suspicious is spotted, the laser can pinpoint exactly what's happening and communications can be sent out to the appropriate first responders.
I think more than one person in the audience audibly oohed at a couple of the images Foster put up.
What I liked best about the Lightning Round is that nobody presented their technology as the be-all/end-all solution. Rather, they all noted they were just pieces in an overall, holistic security system. They emphasized that they augmented what's already out in the field, and they all made a business-case argument for what their products can do.
Andy Lynch, of aXonx, spoke about how his company's video smoke and fire detection can save huge amounts for warehouse owners and other locations where smoke detection is often not a priority because it takes so long for the smoke to get to the ceiling. In fact, many commercial buildings aren't coded for smoke detection, just sprinklers to put the fire out. Once the sprinklers come on, the damage is done, on a number of levels.
He even pointed out that there was no smoke detection in the very ballroom we were sitting in. Everybody looked up. Why was that disconcerting?
While codes still regulate video smoke and fire detection, they're not impenetrable, and for the security installer who's interested in getting into fire, but maybe doesn't want to learn all about panels, etc., this solution makes a ton of sense. It's just cameras and DVRs. Not too difficult of an installation and the potential ROI is huge for the customer you're maybe doing access control for already.
You can see all kinds of videos here, though they use Windows Media Player, which I detest.
Rob Hagens, CTO of Envysion, went over the business case for managed video, and you probably saw the write-up of that in the newswire. I'll reiterate that the SaSS model seems like a no-brainer if you can make the bandwidth and infrastructure work.
Al Liebl, presenting Proximex's PSIM technology, didn't get people hyped the way I thought he would. His presentation made a lot of intellectual sense, and drew some nice correlations to the IT service world, in that PSIM software has the ability to draw together a number of different systems and keep track of all of the security operations in one console, much the way a network is monitored by HP Openview or LANDesk, but I just didn't get very jazzed about it. He didn't have any pictures of the software in action. I think a lot of people were left wondering, "what exactly is PSIM? How does it work? What does it look like? How is it different than software I've seen before? Or is it just the same stuff I've seen with a different acronym attached?"
Anyway, one rule I've taken from the presentation is that you should always provide pictures and video, if you can. Show them, don't tell them (to paraphrase a Rush tune).
Last up was Steve Rice, who came to talk about ISONAS' IP access control. He drew the short straw on a number of levels. First he was last of five (we went alphabetically), but second he's only been with ISONAS for a couple of weeks, replacing Jerry Burhans as VP of sales and marketing there, so, while he knew the technology and had the pitch down, I don't think he was entirely comfortable being grilled by Pat Egan about where the 30 percent in installation cost savings comes.
Essentially, with IP there's no panel, and Rice feels it's now a one-man installation, so there are the savings right there, but Egan felt you'd still need two guys to power the mag locks, etc., and he didn't really see the benefit of the PoE, etc. Some grumbled in the audience that Rice had never actually installed his own product. I think that's probably true, but you've got to give the guy a break.
Still, it raises an interesting question: Has every high-level sales executive at the major security manufacturing companies actually installed their own products? I doubt it. Would it probably be of benefit in the sales process? Seems like it would.
From the Lightning Round, attendees moved back to the exhibit hall, which, to be fair, was pretty deserted. For a variety of reasons, the show floor just wasn't what we'd hoped it would be (though the companies there were exactly the companies that should be there), and attendees saw most of what they needed to see on Day 1.
It sounds a little like making excuses, but I'm serious when I say the exhibitors who understand that TechSec is more of a think tank than a show, and that we expect participation and attendance from our exhibitors, who have the chance to network and learn right along with the attendees, those guys have a great time at TechSec. Exhibitors who are just trying to maximize business card collection shouldn't bother coming. It just isn't that kind of show.
What value do you take away from sitting with four or five integrators for 30 minutes each, each of whom does $25 million in business every year and is just exploring the use of IP technology in their installations? Seems like that's worth a lot. But I'm not sales guy.
One of the more lightly attended sessions, possibly because it was up against a great case study of how megapixel cameras were used in the Montgomery County schools, dealt with using video as evidence. Miles Cowan, the CTO of Insight Video Net, which makes software that helps you manage your video assets, was joined by Jim Abbot, a 21-year veteran of testifying in more than 800 trials as a video expert for Dallas County (thanks for the hook-up cousin Kate!).
For me, this was the most interesting session of the event. If you can't use the video as evidence, that strips it of some serious value. Abbot made a bold claim early: If the video isn't 4 CIF at 30 frames per second, he'd rather have analog tape. This drew any number of objections: that's impossible to store, it takes too much bandwidth to move that around, why isn't 15 frames plenty, etc. But Abbot held firm, saying too often the video he's asked to testify with is insufficient to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and he'd rather not go in there with it.
Further, he didn't think very many systems integrators had any idea how to make sure the video would be admissible in court and essentially accused them of installing worthless systems that present unrealistic expectations for the customers who will eventually be seeking justice. I found that pretty interesting. There seems to be a major disconnect between the technology providers and the court system.
Further further, you might not be able to make the business case for storing video of that quality, but how pissed is the CEO going to be when you can't bring someone to justice because the system he bought isn't providing good enough images? That's a bit of a conundrum, there.
One of the more popular sessions of the day came after lunch (I had cheese torellinis three meals in a row-lunch/dinner/lunch-because that was the only vegetarian alternative they had. You'd think I'd look into vegetarian options ahead of time at my own conference). "Intelligent Video: The Partnership Way" was packed. But then the analytics sessions always are at TechSec. Everyone is either curious about whether they really work or looking forward to telling everyone who'll listen in the Q&A period about how they don't really work at all.
One attendee's remark under his breath: "Why are almost all analytics installations ripped out after less than six months? Should I ask the panelists that?"
Which is why, now, panelists always start with what analytics can't do. Alan Lipton (OV) and Doug Marmon (VideoIQ) did this last year, and Axis' Jumbi Edulbehram started similarly. They can't pick a face out of a crowd. They can't find an object amongst shoulder-to-shoulder people in a crowd. They don't work when there's no light. They can't tell if a person is about to rob someone else.
They can, however, watch a fenceline, or tell you when someone's going the wrong direction, or tell the difference between bus and a car, and when made a piece of a bigger system can provide some good value. Especially (and this was the thrust of the panel) if done at the edge, placed on board IP cameras (he does work for Axis...).
These points were echoed by IP expert at large Mark Kolar (Cisco, AgentVI) and OnSSI's Ted Marolf, and IBM's Steve Russo. Most of what they had to say was pretty common sense: Don't over-promise, test in the field, ask the end user what he wants, use multiple analytics from multiple vendors when possible, have an apple every day, exercise regularly, that type of thing.
A question from the crowd: If you have analytics at the edge, aren't you looking yourself into one kind of camera and one kind of analytics for the long term? If you centralize, can't you switch out the cameras and the analytics much more easily?
Jumbi, et al: Well, the cameras have processors on board now, so you can switch out the analytics from companies like AgentVI and Via:Sys, which are downloadable from the Internet, pretty easily, whether they have new versions or new rules. And sending just metadata and alerts back is a lot easier on the bandwidth than sending all the video back and doing the analysis on the server at the end.
He acknowledged, though, that there are times when analytics at the server make sense, such as when you're searching through archived video to find things that have already happened, rather than just trying to create alerts in real time. Remember, it's the partnership way.
I don't think the general feeling that video analytics are basically worthless has left a lot of the industry yet. We need more success stories and specific incidents where analytics did something that no other sensor could have done in order to convince the skeptics. I mostly believe (kind of like a 6-year-old's opinion on Santa Claus), but I need to see analytics at work in more installations before I'm an evangelist (I've been using that word a lot lately - not sure why).
Finally, TechSec closed with the panel a lot of people had been waiting for: The Future of Standards. Rob Zivney, VP of marketing at Hirsch, had kind of been promising a bit of a scrap to anyone who'd listen for the past two days and he mostly delivered. He led with an explanation of BACnet's progress with an IP access control standard, then posed this question to the rest of the panelists: Why is your standard the best and why is better than what BACnet's doing?
For a while, no one took the bait. Jonas Andersson, chairman of ONVIF, and Rob Hile, chairman of the PSIA, both took pains to emphasize they're not "standards" organizations, but rather groups looking to create specifications that their members can adopt, and which will hopefully become recognized standards at some future date. Roger Roehr, a member of the Smart Card Alliance Board of Directors who serves as the chair of the Smart Card Alliance Physical Access Council, made it clear that the Smart Card Alliance just steals standards from other people and issues white papers about how to implement them.
But Hunter Knight, one of the guys who started the OSIPS standards effort at SIA, was pretty clearly chafed by recent developments on the standards front. First, he didn't like the idea that SIA would be used as a "pass through" organization for standards created by PSIA or ONVIF. There is a clearly delineated standard for creating standards, he noted, as created by ANSI, and he needs to follow that in order for SIA standards to be recognized worldwide. He can't just take a document from another organization and send it up the flag pole. There needs to be a comment period, universal ability for participation (i.e., no pay to play), etc.
Further, he accused PSIA and ONVIF of "balkanizing" the industry, "insuring that the standards effort in this industry will fail." Rather than teaming with SIA, as they could have, these two organizations, he said, tried to go it their own way.
Both Hile and Andersson stressed, however, that their standards are not mutually exclusive, and Hile even said they might come together in version 2.0 of the device discovery standard. But the two groups do differ on how they think people should architect their products. While ONVIF has backed a web services model, PSIA has gone with RESTful architecture. (Follow those links for what exactly that means. They're not mutually exclusive at all. It's just that Andersson kept saying "web services" and Hile kept saying "REST." There's got to be something important there.)
Why does all this matter? One PSIM manufacturer stood up and asked how a software maker was supposed to build in so many different standards and specifications without going bankrupt. Hile made the point that two years ago, there weren't any standards, so having a few was certainly better than not having any.
Another attendee made the point that the lack of a clear standard was holding the industry back, much like people didn't dive into HD DVD players until there was a winner in the Blu-Ray/HD Video competition. Maybe there is a lack of interest in investing in IP security systems when there is some trepidation as to what the industry will eventually decide on in terms of how products talk to one another. What happens if you install a system now going with a PSIA-endorsed standard, but then that group collapses and everyone goes with OSIPS? Will it be much more difficult to add new sensors in the future?
As usual, TechSec seemed to raise more questions than it answered. I consider that to be a good thing. This isn't a conference where dumb or unenlightened people go to hear smart and enlightened people tell them all the answers. This is a conference where one is made to think, is exposed to new ways of doing things, and from which one should come away with any number of new ideas for solutions to existing problems.
I think, in large part, this show was the most successful yet. The speakers were consistently thought-provoking and there was real disagreement on the panels, especially those concerning storage and standards, about the "right" way of doing something. So little disagreement makes it to the light of day in this industry, where everyone is so polite and conservative in their arguing. But it's only through a good argument that many things get decided. Without someone to push back against your ideas, how are you ever to know whether they hold water?
At TechSec, there was plenty of push back, and it was all for the better. See you next year.